


No Safety Or Surprise

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [2]
Category: Wiseguy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 22:52:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15253809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Frank will never stop looking until he finds Vince.





	No Safety Or Surprise

Frank shifted on the sofa, trying to get comfortable, but the rustle of papers under his head was too annoying, and the dog sleeping on his feet too heavy. And the dog was snoring.

There was nothing in the print-outs he'd badgered Dan into getting for him, but he hadn't thrown them away yet, and they lay scattered around his apartment, confetti with a thyroid condition. There was a morbid satisfaction in having personally checked every number called from the pay phone near Vince's house, and personally run into every dead end.

But then, Frank’s whole life had become about dead ends of one kind or another.

After Vince's memorial Mass, Frank had started going to Mass again, not just on Sunday, but every Tuesday at St. Barnabas. He made a novena, then he realized he hadn't been to confession since he was twelve years old.

He'd stopped believing in God the year before, when he'd done everything he could think of—wished on his birthday candles, prayed the rosary, threw all the money he could scrounge into the Goodwill Santa's pot—to convince God to make his father love him.

It hadn't happened. God had failed him.

So Frank had stopped believing in God.

He kept going to confession, though, because he was still afraid of going to hell. It took him a while to realize that if there was no God, who was going to send him to hell?

So Frank stopped going to confession. And when he was old enough to do it without his mother knowing about it (and suffering the disappointment he knew she'd feel), he stopped going to Mass.

But maybe he'd never really stopped believing in God, not if he was praying for Vince's safe return. Whether he really believed or not, he knew the rules, and one of the implicit ones was, if you were going to ask a favor, you wore your best suit to ask it in, which in the case of God meant cleaning up your soul. He still remembered Sister Bernadette drawing a picture of the soul on the blackboard, and showing them all how nice and clean it was. Then she drew some marks inside to show how the soul looked when you sinned. And finally, she erased those marks, to show how confession worked. You did this to show your love for God.

Frank couldn't say he loved God because he didn’t, but it couldn't hurt to go to confession, so he did, at first barely able to talk to the priest, until finally his anger and fear broke the dam—which, ironically, was made up of anger and fear—and it all poured out.

And then he made another novena, two, three, four, the priest at St. Barnabas came to recognize him, seemed to think he was a devout new parishioner, and that made Frank feel like shit. He'd decided he had to stop his novenas at nine. Nine times nine, that was supposed to be—something, wasn't it? Frank couldn't remember, and anyway it seemed like it was stop there, or go on forever, and Frank couldn't go on forever.

Eighty-one weeks of going to Mass twice a week, and he hadn't gone crazy yet. Frank attributed this to his already being crazy.

For Vince, the Church was a refuge; for Frank it was a Hail Mary play, you should pardon the joke. It did not make Frank feel better, it made him cheap; it was like going begging. He didn't think he believed in God, and it seemed wrong to go asking for favors when he couldn't give the faith that was required. All he could give was his determination.

He was too tired to sit up, but he did turn over on his back, dislodging the dog, and he managed to pull the papers out from under his head and toss them onto the floor. The dog looked up at him, eyes full of gentle reproach, and Frank invited him back onto the sofa with him. He wasn't sure what kind of dog he was—kinds, there was more than one breed there, certainly. Border collie, he thought, from the nose, and maybe some Pekingese—the tail did that Pekingese flip, and he was a small dog. Nothing else Frank could identify. The dog had entered his life the week before when Frank had seen a Jetta pull over on J. F. Kennedy Boulevard and dump the animal before taking off. Frank had wanted to shoot out the VW's tires, but had contented himself with picking up the scared little dog and taking him home. He still seemed a bit shell-shocked by his abandonment, and liked to stay close to Frank, generally sleeping on his feet. The way his relationships with people were going, Frank was glad to have the companionship.

Last week there had been his falling out with Dan—not over the phone numbers he'd insisted on, they'd argued that one out—but on what Dan called his selfish, morose outlook. "And don't give me that Catholic guilt excuse, Frank. **I'm** Catholic. This is just you."

Frank didn't argue the assessment. It had come to a head when, fed up with him, Dan had cut him off in mid-sentence with, "That's one thing you two sure had in common—he always acted like he had a monopoly on suffering, too, especially where you were concerned." The past tense was like sandpaper on Frank's nerves, and to avoid a blow-up he was too tired for, he'd walked out.

Then Thursday, when he'd called to make arrangements for his weekend with Drake, Jenny had tried to talk to him about his recent moodiness, and suggested he not be around Drake—"just for a while, until whatever this is has passed."

Passed. As if he would somehow snap out of this, be fine with Vince MIA. But Frank had agreed with her. It would be better not to subject Drake to his anger, his melancholy, his grief—especially since he had no way to explain any of them.

He couldn't even tell Jenny that he'd lost Vince, not because of any rules, but because he couldn't bring himself to. Why should she trust him with their son when he couldn't be trusted with a well-trained, well-armed, fully-grown OCB agent? Frank knew the analogy didn't hold, but cutting himself the slack admitting that required just didn't go with the hair shirt he was wearing. He'd simply apologized, and asked her to explain to Drake, tried to ignore the way she'd sighed and said she'd try. Her epiphany had apparently not included relinquishing her passive-aggressive behavior.

He hadn't heard anything from Lococco because, as Lococco told him when Frank had called that morning, there was nothing to hear, yet. "Learn some patience, Frank, and quit bugging me; buy yourself some wool and start weaving. Odysseus will get home when he gets home." If Roger hadn't been his only hope, Frank would've hung up on him. Not that he thought that anything he could possibly say or do would make Roger stop looking for Vince. His fear with Roger was that he'd be cut out of the loop. That kept him careful.

His next call was to Rudy. The old man had sounded strange, abrupt and distracted, not like Frank had ever heard him. _Does he know something? Has he been pulling strings? Dear God, I hope so._

Frank had given up any pretense of caring which side of the fence salvation came from, as long as it came. But whatever he was doing, if anything, Rudy wasn't telling Frank, and before Frank could ask, he'd ended the conversation. It was unsettling, but Frank clung to it with hope.

He hadn't thought it could get worse—how could it get worse? But it did.

He'd been walking out of the laundromat when he'd seen a blue Charger. Vinnie's blue Charger, he would have sworn, and maybe it was. Why couldn't it be? He'd sold the car himself, after Rudy had asked him to, though it had made him sick to do it; he'd sold it to some guy in the Bronx for one hundred dollars over blue book. Seeing it on the street—you certainly couldn't call that a miraculous occurrence, could you? What else did he think the guy was going to do but drive it?

Yeah, but seeing it driven by Sonny Steelgrave was—

A delusion. An unhealthy hallucination, the ultimate bad trip. Vince's car was being driven around the Bronx (and maybe New Jersey, why not, it wasn't the other side of the world) by a twenty-two year old kid who thought muscle cars were chick magnets. It was not being driven around New Jersey (or anyplace else) by a dead mobster, with Vinnie (it was not Vinnie) slumped in the passenger side.

It wasn't like it was the first time he'd seen Vince since the night of his abduction; Frank had nearly accosted a guy in a Mobile station where he'd stopped for gas, the imagined similarity was so strong. He knew his eyes were only trying to help, seeking out the pattern of large, dark-haired men in the hopes one of them would be Vinnie. "Yeah, right, because he's not in some cell in El Salvador, he's really working in a gas station in West Orange. Why didn't I think to look there before?" He was bagging groceries at Safeway; he was standing on the corner, waiting for a bus; he was safe—

Frank's eyes showed him what his brain wanted to see, and for a moment or two, there would be such relief. Then his brain would realize the lie. It wasn't Vince, it was some stranger in a blue sweatshirt, and his heart would plummet.

That was an explanation Frank could accept, and it explained everything, except how Steelgrave had gotten behind the wheel of that Charger.

"Simple, genius. It wasn't him." Yeah, no kidding, but that didn't explain why Frank had seen him. Why, out of all the faces living in his memory, should his mind choose to conjure up Steelgrave's?

"Maybe because the guy looked like him. Somebody shows you something that looks like a strawberry, you're not going to see an apple just because you're allergic to strawberries. Some guy out there with a passing resemblance to Steelgrave drives past you in a car that looks like the one Vince had, and what do you do? You try to get yourself killed, running into the street to chase it."

He looked down at the dog sleeping on his chest, stroked his soft fur. "Chasing cars. Maybe I need to spend less time with you; next thing you know, I'll be burying my stuff in the backyard and growling at the mailman." Maybe it hadn't even been a Charger; it had been going pretty fast. Probably just being the same color was enough for this particular breed of wish-fulfillment.

Vince was the wish. Steelgrave was just Dickens's undigested bit of meat, or whatever it was Scrooge had called Marley. Frank hoped he wasn't the shape of things to come, subconscious-wise. "Because, dog, I don't think I could handle Sonny Steelgrave hanging around my subconscious." The dog was sleeping. "You could use a name," Frank told him. "I'll try to come up with a good one for you." He thought about getting up, getting some food, or maybe just going into the bedroom, to sleep in his bed, but that seemed too final. Bed was where you slept when you'd turned in for the night, when you'd locked the doors, pulled the shades, turned out the lights. It was what you did when everyone was home safe.

No, he'd stay on the sofa again tonight, that was better. Because sleeping on the sofa was what you did when you were waiting for someone to come home.


End file.
